The Senate voted on the Chen nomination and approved it on a largely partisan 56-42 vote.

Three Democrats who call themselves pro-life, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, all voted for the pro-abortion judicial pick.

The Senate Judiciary Committee signed off on Chen’s nomination in October 2009 on a 12-7 party-line vote, but Republicans used a filibuster to stop a vote in the full Senate and Obama was forced to renominate him.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Chen in March. Pro-life advocates oppose Chen because of his time spent as an attorney for the pro-abortion ACLU — Chen has come under criticism because he was employed as an ACLU attorney in San Francisco for decades.

Conservative columnist Warner Todd Huston says Chen is out of the mainstream.

“Well, for one, the left-wing American Bar Association rated Chen a ‘well qualified’ nominee and many of his associates at the ACLU speak highly of him,” he said. “Chen was quite the ACLU activist between 1979 and 2001. His ACLU history would suffice to make many wary of him, of course.”

Huston also said Chen would be a judge in the activist mold of those who allowed virtually unlimited abortions under Roe v. Wade.

“Now, what of his judicial standards? What sort of philosophy does Chen employ on the bench? Is it a strict standard of reading at law, or is he one of those sorts of judicial activists that uses the law to spread his own particular philosophy of social justice? Sadly, it appears to be the latter,” he writes.

“For Obama’s judges, experiences and feelings trump the Constitution and the law and these experiences and feelings should be used as a basis to adjudicate the cases that come before them,” Huston concludes.

Chen would become the first Asian-American judge to sit in the Northern District of California, which stretches from Northern District of California.